The wonderful ISBE conference, this year in Minneapolis! Four talks on our work: Luke McClean on honeyguide vocal mimicry, Nick Horrocks on camouflage and thermoregulation in ground-nesting birds, Cassie Stoddard (of Princeton University) on egg pattern signature evolution in cuckoo finch hosts, and Claire Spottiswoode on honeyguide-human mutualism.
New paper on imperfect egg mimicry
Our paper “Combined measures of mimetic fidelity explain imperfect mimicry in a brood parasite-host system” has just been published in the journal Biology Letters. This study was led by Tanmay Dixit, and carried out together with Gary Choi, Salem al-Mosleh, Jess Lund, Jolyon Troscianko, Collins Moya, L Mahadevan, and Claire Spottiswoode, as part of a collaboration between our group and Prof. Mahadevan and his lab at Harvard University. Together we combined mathematical tools and field experiments in Zambia to quantify a key difference – “squiggle” markings – between the eggs of hosts (tawny-flanked prinias) and parasites (cuckoo finches). We showed that suboptimal behaviour on the part of prinias allows cuckoo finches to get by with an imperfect copy of prinia eggs.